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Theatre

I really really loved this play. It does that awful thing of feeling quite simple but also being totally knotted. Awful for me, I mean.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we react to reactions against injustice. About how the tendency, I think, is to laugh. Or at least, to shy away from taking it seriously. When someone takes the injustice that has been so violently thrust upon them and reacts against it, it is very easy to dismiss them. I’ve been thinking a lot about how audiences are powerful. I’d like to preface with what I am about to say with the promise that I don’t think there is any “correct” way to behave in a theatre. I think it is elitist to think there is. And yet. And yet, when I sit in the Royal Court, and I watch Anna (Nicola Walker) be called a cunt by her father (Alun Armstrong) and the man sitting next to me lets out a laugh, a guffaw, I grip the sides of my seat and I feel my heart catch in my throat. Anna is stony faced, up there, and I remain stony faced down here. Solidarity, I think. And when he shouts and shouts at his wife (Maggie Steed), bullying her and pushing her further and further into the corners of the stage, and a pointless quip releases people around me to giggle I just cannot stop thinking how, how can you laugh at a time like this. There is a very clear and tangible symbol of power on stage, and it is being discussed very frankly. There is no doubt that this is a play of pain and horror. This is a play about men, and the damage they inflict, because of the damage that is inflicted upon them.

I’ve been thinking a lot about guilt. About whether guilt is a useful feeling. Whether it is a feeling that is worth anything at all. I don’t mean small bouts of guilt. I mean that massive systemic guilt. Guilt that presses down upon your back like the ceiling of a house. Did you take any of your guilt with you into the night? I think about the huge window in front of us – a stage disguised as a window disguised as a mirror. I think a lot about how laughter is political. It seems to speak for everyone when it occurs because it is so vocal. Did you mean for that laughter to happen? Does it matter? But but all I can think as I walk out of the theatre is that I did not find that play funny. I did not laugh once. Oh here I was thinking I was a person, but I was an institution this whole timeThat’s not quite the line. The line is slightly different but that is the intent, and yet there is a murmur of knowing laughter. I didn’t see The Writer but I am not sure I could have coped. I heard and read from Ava that it was so incredibly wrong for it to be in The Almeida but also incredibly important for it to be there. I feel the same way about this. I’m not sure I can shrug it off. And that last monologue. That last moment of the ceiling falling and falling and nearly not quite crushing while there is a release? A testimony. A plea for … for forgiveness? Acceptance? Kindness? When does forgiveness become history and history stop accusing and start understanding. Does it? I don’t even know if it should. Just because you committed an act of atrocity as a result of an institution does not mean that you did not commit the atrocity.I’ve been thinking a lot about the value of forgiveness, of kindness. Who is afforded it, and who is given the final word. There’s a tendency to let him redeem himself but but but what if I can’t I can’t And if this play is about anything it is about how we react. How we react to abuses of power and how those with the power react to us. Sitting in those seats, those expensive seats, I wasn’t sure which side I was on.

(for the first half of the post, and some context go to ava’s blog here)

*** the next day ***

Eve 0:58

I think with the metaphor, with what you were saying about Palmyra and stuff, I think that’s very true. Umm yeah I think that both Eurohouse and Lands did that very well, but I think I do get on with that kind of stuff because if it’s done badly it’s just

So

Shit

But if it’s done well it’s some of the most powerful stuff you can do because it’s so subtle and I’m really interested in the idea that you can talk about something and you can really make a statement without talking directly about it. I think it’s a really really interesting way of being like artistically political in a very kind of obscure and also enjoyable way, but also quite painful.

Eve 0:59

I mean obviously I was actually sick but I also wasn’t bc it was just paranoia! and I was fully just being a hypochondriac. I was thinking when you said that, I think maybe it was partly the show in kind of a good way like it really made me feel quite kind of physically like i wanted to

*hurl*

In a very visceral way. And I think maybe I was so kind of clenched the whole way through and just

Because you sort of know. You know how it’s gonna end like you know the direction it’s going in. As soon as she says that first line of like ‘I can’t get off’ I thought I know exactly what this is and I can see this and I can see where this is going and I don’t like it but I know I’m going to have to sit through it and I think that’s sort of the point.

Ava 0:54

Yeah like (what was I gonna say ummm yeah) the way that they both reduce down um politics or just sort of feelings, the way emotion is reduced to like an action and aCH I don’t know it’s really hard to explain? You’d think it wouldn’t be but it is.

I don’t really know what kind of theatre that is.

And I feel like there should be more of it but as you say it’s really difficult to do. Um yeah I mean maybe we’re both quite simplistic people but I get a lot out of that kind of thing and I think that’s why FellSwoop are so popular (well popular in this really tiny group) because it’s such an accessible way of doing it

Ava 0:52

Yeah I feel like I didn’t really know that it was about that, not that it was all about it but that like so much of it was going to be about getting Sophie off of the trampoline and I think to do that over what like an hour and 20 minutes is like the most difficult thing to do – like to just draw out that conceit and to not make it feel like it’s just a rehearsal technique, because it kind of feels like bits of that show feel like they could be things that people use in rehearsal – like let’s try and get this person out of the room or get this person off this thing like how many different ways can you do it. But the skill in Lands is that it’s never made to feel extraneous – it’s always very rooted in like those characters

Eve 0:52

I think also – sorry I haven’t listened to the voice note you just sent – but yeah I think something that definitely interests, certainly interests us, but also generally “”young”” people, is this idea of casualised violence and the idea that we see these little snippets of brutal and sort of hyperbolic like violence, destruction, catastrophe and it’s all like contained in a tiny little, like a bomb (??) I don’t know how to describe it but I think that’s sort of how the show felt. It’s something that Eurohouse/Palmyra did which is have this very contained, small but extremely explosive violence.

Eve 0:57

Yeah I agree. I think I’ve sort of said everything I think about it but I know what you mean about the rehearsal thing – I think that’s very true and I think it’s so hard to tread the line between ‘I’ve seen this before I know this I know the intent and I know the direction’ and then to also make it surprising and interesting and kind of playful and feel quite spontaneously playful because I think some of the worst things (okay not the worst things that’s not true) but something that I find frustrating sometimes is a fake liveness or pointing to a liveness that isn’t actually there. I think I find that frustrating but I think maybe Lands did that sometimes but I think other times it did feel quite true. So I thought they trod(??) treaded??? They tread that line very well.

Ava 0:40

Yeah no I totally agree about the violence thing. Yeah completely – the way it’s sort of like hyper-intensive and very small and sort of – I don’t know maybe that’s almost a response to the way that a younger generation are perceived as overly sensitive and stuff, but these kind of companies I feel like they really pinpoint why certain things are so horrific and they really sort of isolate them and put them in a sort of under a microscope and they’re just kinda like look this is really really horrifically painful

Ava 0:53

Yeah I think I’m pretty much done too but yeah the sort of fake liveness thing – I’m kind of getting increasingly annoyed now. I feel like that whole trend of like “oh, the performance is falling apart!” it’s kind of annoying me now. I feel like so many people have done it and it’s kind of like – I feel like an interesting way for it to progress (like for that idea to progress) is for that “thing” like that supposed breakdown of the performance to be recognised in itself as being artificial, as being part of the stagecraft

This year I got to write an essay about two of my most favourite bits of art from the past nine months. One was a play called Speed Death of the Radiant Child by Chris Goode that was directed by my pal Ben and produced by my other pal Emily. Also many pals were performing in the play too. I loved it with all my heart. The other one was Stranger Things, a TV show that I didn’t think I would end up loving as much as I did. The danger with writing an academic essay on things you love is that you get carried away. I wrote an essay on Anatomy of a Suicide and it was damn hard to separate my love for the show with critical analysis.

I think I did okay with this one though. This module was HARD but I really loved it. We looked at environmental texts and ideas of ecology and nature and waste. I learnt a hell of a lot and it’s the reason I could write down these ideas. I am damn proud of this essay. It didn’t get the highest mark in whole word, but I don’t care. It took me a very long time to write, and it’s one of the things I am most proud to have researched and thought about and I know for a FACT that no-one will have written anything like it yet (probably) so that makes me feel like maybe someday I might sort of be an academic?? Maybe. Anyway, I wanted to publish it. SO if you want to read it, here is my 5,500 word essay on Speed Death and Stranger Things as ecological texts that trace our collective nuclear history through internal and external environments.

Bodily Pain as Environmental Trauma in Speed Death of the Radiant Child and Stranger Things

‘Eternal source of light divine

With double warmth thy beams display’

Eternal Source of Light Divine (Birthday Ode for Queen Anne), Handel

Speed Death of the Radiant Child by Chris Goode and Stranger Things by the Duffer Brothers both explore imagery of young bodies in pain. Bodily pain is presented as the cause and consequence of environmental damage, particularly in regards to radiation and nuclear activity. This essay is punctuated by lyrics from songs which appear in Goode’s script and which inspired a student performance of the play in 2017. These two texts can be read with a view towards ecocriticism if they are framed as a diptych. A diptych is a painting or tablet with two panels, connected by a hinge, that conveys a discursive message. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann use this framing in their essay ‘Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A Diptych’, and it is helpful to see the two primary texts of this essay in this way. They write that ‘the diptych exceeds its “merely” material dimension, and creates a double bridge of meanings between the “text” it conveys and the world in which it occurs.’ (448), and so Speed Death of the Radiant Child and Stranger Things reflect each other in their interlocking themes, but spread out in their scope and investigation of trauma into the world around them. On the left hand panel of the diptych is Speed Death, a play whichfocuses on a hospital that houses Charlotte (a troubled young woman with a mysterious blue tube in her inner thigh) and the people who orbit around her. Goode’s script is abstract and impenetrable in its intellectual scope, often spiralling out of control. The hospital becomes a leaking nuclear power plant, and as the toxic leak is subsumed into the characters they become one body, and at one with the building. Then on the right hand panel, Stranger Things is a TV show which fits more into the science fiction genre. Will (a young boy) is taken into the Upside Down; a world parallel to our own but is rife with danger and destruction. In the second season, which I will be focusing on, the monster of the Upside Down enters Will and begins to use him as a host. What ties these two panels together is their discussion of trauma and how it is tied to environmentalism. The bodies in Speed Death and Stranger Things experience traumatic bodily pain because of their environment which has been wounded as a result of a toxicity. Nuclear radiation seeps into the body and disrupts the ecological landscapes of the text, and so both pieces show how a broken environment causes and is caused by the broken body.

‘I imagine what my body would sound like

Slamming up herest those rocks’

Hyperballad, Bjork

As the audience are confronted with bodies in pain and pleasure in Speed Death, both become synonymous with (simultaneously causing and caused by) the leaking hospital. Bodies become buildings and buildings become bodies; bodies act as containers and vessels (also seen in Stranger Things). Charlotte introduces this idea in the first lines of Speed Death – ‘This deep blue light. Filling the whole building…And I keep thinking, blue the colour of… Stupid. / This building full of blue light.’ (7) The colour blue is linked with the glowing light of the hospital, but also with the toxic glow of radiation. Radiation is seen as a toxic contamination of the body which Goode presents as both a contamination on the body and something that lives within it. Later, Charlotte clarifies, ‘This empty building with all the machines and animals sleeping full of blue light, and I, I keep thinking. / Blue the colour of skin’ (8). Charlotte’s skin is blue like the inside light of the building; she is both a vessel, as the building is a vessel, and a contaminated host. A line can be drawn to Will in Stranger Things, in which a child’s body becomes a host for a parasitic monster.

In order to understand the overarching metaphor of bodies in pain, it is useful to note that Speed Death and Stranger Things both grapple with the idea of the body as an ecosystem. In their essay, ‘Material Ecocriticism: Dirt, Waste, Bodies, Food, and Other Matter’, Dana Phillips and Heather I. Sullivan unpick how material ecocriticism is ‘radically local’ in its efforts to examine ‘the ecosystems on your skin, under your shoes, in your digestive tract, and in your very cells, too.’ (447) Similarly, it seems the bodies in Speed Death are dissected in almost minute detail, both in the psychological framing of Nick’s research and in the biblical readings of Justine’s artworks. Justine notes that to truly understand the body’s pain and pleasure ‘there has to be this encounter with the body and that means getting inside the body’ (38). Will’s body contorts and so often becomes the centre of scenes of trauma in Stranger Things. His body becomes emblematic of the ecosystem of Hawkins that connects to the Upside Down. As Justine describes in Speed Death, we understand everything through the body. It is our indicator for the moments when meaning is distorted and environments are corrupted:

(We share) a sense of the individual body as a container and carrier of information. We absorb and we radiate. We record and we play back. We are read and we ourselves write…The fundamental unit of our social relations and our civic meaning is the individual body (60-61)

The body is the beginning and end point for all human life, and anything that holds that life up. It is how we experience the environment around us. Significantly, the body is altered in Speed Death. It is often consumed by pleasure – Nick shouts ‘You know I can feel it. Can you?…All down the spine….It’s like being…Fucked’ (90-91) as the radiation leaks out of the hospital and into the bodies of the characters. Justine calls it the ‘erotic collapse of the distance between us’ (38) – the barriers of the body break down and mutate because of the toxic environment that it is contained in. Pleasure as an altered physical state is linked with pain in Speed Death through Keith Haring’s painting, ‘The Radiant Child’, which somewhat acts as the iconography of the show. Haring was a gay American artist who died of AIDS in 1990. AIDS is an illness where pain and pleasure meet. The homoerotic connotations of AIDS is tied to the severe pain that the patients experience. In this way, Goode allows a line to be drawn between pain and pleasure as significant ways of altering the body.

In examining pain as a thing which alters the body, it is useful to look to Elaine Scarry’s book, The Body in Pain. She states that pain is a wholly inexpressible bodily experience. She writes,

The events happening within the interior of that person’s body may seem to have the remote character of some deep subterranean fact, belonging to an invisible geography that, however portenuous, has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth (3)

Here, Scarry is explaining that whatever is happening inside a body is unknowable to the person standing next to them – it has no reality because it cannot be seen or felt in any true way by the other person. Therefore, pain becomes an ephemeral beast to try and qualify. Scarry pinpoints the difficulty of a thesis such as mine, in that although ‘there is virtually no piece of literature that is not about suffering’ (11), pain seems to actively destroy language in its very existence (4). Although pain drastically alters the body, there is no way to accurately describe this altering. The pain in Speed Death is often deferred or emotional – there is only one moment of physical pain, when Ash burns himself on a tealight:

In the distance, what sounds like a car alarm going off. / He holds his right hand over one of the candles, palm down. / After a while his hand starts to shake with the pain. He holds his right wrist with his left hand to steady himself. / The alarm continues to sound. (60)

It is in the character of Charlotte that pain is most abstracted by Goode. Proof of Charlotte’s self-harm comes late in the play, in the forms of scars on her body. It is referenced throughout, and visualised through Nick’s psychological analysis; ‘repeated self-administered lacerations, apparently carried out over a period of six to nine months, most probably using a Stanley knife or similar blade. Over thirty separate scars were counted.’ (78) This is explained in parallel with the blue rectangle in Charlotte’s thigh – Goode leads the audience to the conclusion that the two are one and the same. Charlotte’s self-inflicted wounds are inseparable from the toxic radiation which has lodged itself inside her. In Stranger Things the pain is often more visceral; both Will and Eleven experience intense physical pain. Significantly, their pain is because of a supernatural attachment to an outside force. The parasite in Will’s veins is paralleled with the veins that track underneath the surface of the ground in Hawkins through cinematic visual metaphors. This connects the disintegration of the pumpkins in Episode One and Will’s deteriorating health. Therefore, when Will screams in horror as Hopper sets fire to the roots that connect to the Upside Down, it is clear that the trauma inflicted on the environment directly affects Will’s body. In both Speed Death and Stranger Things, a body in pain is never an isolated occurrence. In these texts inexpressible bodily pain is communicated through a wounded environment, and further in Will and Charlotte, pain cannot be separated from the toxic environment the characters live in. Bodily pain is shown to be the twin of environmental trauma – one cannot be experienced without the other.

‘His wound is bleeding day and night’

Corpus Christi Carol, Jeff Buckley

Marianne Hirsch notes that ‘trauma, in its literal meaning, is a wound inflicted on the body’ (72), and so if we consider trauma as defined by its Greek etymology ‘wound’, we might gain a better understanding of how it manifests in art. The wounded body is easier to comprehend than the traumatized body. A cut knee or scarred body are visible wounds, whereas childhood trauma or a tumour is far less visible. Furthermore, the earth is also a kind of body which can be wounded and experience trauma. Images of a beach devastated by a tsunami (“Then And Now: The Aftermath Of The 2004 Indonesian Tsunami – In Pictures”) are more powerful than statistics about beetles deteriorating in the Amazon (Thompson). In a review of a student production of Speed Death of a Radiant Child, it is noted that ‘there’s a lot of pain. Pain quite literally with the nurse convulsing on the floor and the doctor being knocked unconscious’ (Harrison). Bodily pain and trauma are in conversation with each other in a play like Speed Death – the wounded body is equated with the traumatised body, and so one begins to see how the literal wounds inflicted on the body and the earth also manifest in psychological wounding. Charlotte’s scarred body is also a deeply troubled body, and so the two begin to become synonymous. Scarry’s assertion that pain is an inexpressible human condition can also be applied to the trauma of the play. Similarly, a blog about Stranger Things notes that the show ‘is about grief and loss. It’s about trauma.’ (Stephens), particularly the trauma of young bodies. The blog is not an academic journal, but it gives important insight into the audience reception of the show, and how the themes of trauma are interpreted. The trauma in Stranger Things is explored through metaphor and monsters, both the monster and the trauma are presented as undeniably real occurrences. Will is not only suffering from PTSD, but he is also being infected by a monster in a parallel universe. Both the trauma and the monster are somewhat inexplicable in their manifestation and reality, and so the Duffer Brothers allow an exploration of trauma through science fiction. Stranger Things is set in an America consumed by fear of the Cold War, and the threat of nuclear destruction, while Speed Death is set in the Windscale Nuclear Plant in post war Britain. Both Speed Death and Stranger Things examine corrupted bodies as a result of human interference. Therefore, the texts are located in different genres and geographies, but interconnect in their analysis of trauma as an inexpressible experience.

The young bodies in these two texts are interwoven with their environments, and their environments become toxic, which in turn makes the bodies toxic; an inherited trauma from the land to the body. In ‘Bodies That Remember’ Derek J. Thiess explores how bodily histories are inscribed by the environments that they live in and are therefore in opposition with one another while also informing each other; ‘there is a clear juxtaposition of planetary ecosystem and human body such that they continually call one another into question—their living and dying mirror one another.’ (141) In Chapter One of Stranger Things, Will is brought into Hawkins National Laboratory to help him recover from the trauma of being taken to an alternative dimension. The scientists connect receptors to his brain (again the body is the site of trauma and remembering) and ask him what happens in his “episodes”, where he feels as if he is in the Upside Down. He says ‘there was this storm…I felt. Frozen…Just frozen…I felt this evil like it was looking at me…To kill…Not me, everyone else’ (24:00-26:10). Significantly, Will mentions the storm before he describes the creature that is looking at him, suggesting that the environment of the Upside Down is as important as what inhabits it. The environment of the Upside Down is written onto Will and into his bodily history as he becomes infected by the monster in the storm. Will is weakened by the environment inhabiting in his body, but he is also connected to the alternative dimension and when it is harmed, he is harmed; they mirror each other, as Thiess suggests.

Sandra Steingraber writes inLiving Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment that ‘our bodies, too, are living scrolls of sorts. What is written there – inside the fibers of our cells and chromosomes – is a record of our exposure to environmental contaminants’ (236). Steingraber compares the human body to the trunk of a tree; the rings of the tree narrate its history just our body narrates our history. This can be applied to a literal wounding, or to a traumatic wounding; it is all kept in the body. This is seen in Speed Death as the environment of the hospital and the nuclear plant sits within the bodies of the characters, most obviously in the blue tube in Charlotte’s leg. The Windscale fire at the nuclear reactor plant in 1957 is the heart of Speed Death and is the setting of the play. This is the toxic environment which bleeds into the bodies that inhabit it, just as in Stranger Things. Justine quotes Rene Richard’s essay ‘The Radiant Child’ in Speed Death, saying that in Haring’s painting, one sees ‘the child’s body being bombarded with what he calls communications, “radioactive communications”’ (9). Here, Goode introduces an intellectual reading of the painting as a microcosm of the image at the heart of the play – a body being ‘bombarded’ with radiation, and ultimately becoming synonymous with that radioactive environment. As Justine elaborates on Three Mile Island as the worst civilian nuclear accident at the time, she explains that ‘those lines, that’s not a metaphor, that’s not information as radiation, that’s radiation as radiation.’ (10). The radiation can therefore be read as the wound on the body – it is the reason for the collapsing body and collapsing landscape. As the radiation finds its way into Nick’s body, he becomes increasingly broken, and at the end his body fully collapses. Furthermore, an inexpressible traumatic pain is represented through the wounds inflicted by leaking radiation. It is a wound in a metaphorical sense but also in a corporeal way.

‘Muscle connects to the bone

And bone to the ire and the marrow

I wish I had a gentle mind’

Marrow, St. Vincent

After examining the nature of the trauma that afflicts the characters in Stranger Things and Speed Death, it is interesting to examine how these two texts intersect in their discussion of vulnerable bodies. In both pieces, children are at the centre of the ecological trauma. Charlotte in Speed Death is just 19 years old, acting as the only visible child’s body, and Jordan Beaker is a dead child star that Laura, Charlotte’s nurse, is infatuated with. Further, Will is merely 14 years old alongside Dustin, Mike, and Lucas. The child stars that act in Stranger Things have an almost uncanny resemblance to Jordan Beaker’s fame that Laura discusses in Speed Death; ‘Suddenly he’s in Hollywood. And everyone who’s a vegan says he’s a vegan and everyone who wants to marry a rabble-rouser says he’s a rabble-rouser and everybody, everybody, is convinced he’s bisexual’ (42) A child actor is caught between childhood and adulthood; living within a vulnerable body in a world they are not yet built for. It is in this vulnerable place that Jordan Beaker dies; ‘By the time they get him to hospital, his skin is blue, his lips are dark blue, his fingernails are dark blue.’ (42) Again Goode reiterates blue as a colour of death and radiation, but also of pleasure and the body. Each time it is mentioned, the body is redefined. Whether it is Charlotte’s body becoming a building, Ash’s body in a dream, or Jordan Beaker’s body in death, the audience are confronted with blue as a signifier of the body changing. Laura echoes this by saying, ‘you trust someone beautiful, and then they die, and then you have to trust that.’ (43) In the final moments of the play, Charlotte walks across the stage, naked, and she is bathed in ‘deep blue light.’ (93) It is in this moment that she becomes a vulnerable body in the most visible sense. Both as an actress and a character, Charlotte is exposed and reborn. In this way, the vulnerable body of a child is emblematic of a body in flux, dictated by environmental disruption. Theiss writes that ‘biological body and written history are one and the same…reshaped the boundaries among history, place, and body’ (145). It might therefore be useful to think of a child’s body as vulnerable because of its yet unformed history. If biology and written history are the same, a young body is physically and emotionally susceptible to the environment surrounding it. Furthermore, the body mirrors the environment but in so doing sheds light back onto the characters. In Stranger Things the environment acts as a metaphor for adolescence – for Will’s emotional and physical growth which mirrors the entropy in the landscape. In Monstrous Nature, Murray and Huemann discuss Germany Year Zero, a film which explores ‘effects an eco-horror caused by total war and occupation has on innocence, especially the innocence of children whose external and internal landscapes have become broken’ (xx). Huemann and Murray’s description of the children’s broken ‘external and internal landscapes’ could be applied to the children of Speed Death and Stranger Things. All the young bodies in these texts experience trauma and loss; their bodies are attacked physically by a toxic environment. Furthermore, in Chris Goode’s abstract world, it is the death of Jordan Beaker that causes the fire in the nuclear power plant where Charlotte is housed. The timelines falter in the world of Speed Death, meaning that the vulnerability of a child’s body causes such a rift, that a hospital turns into a power plant, and the radiation inside it leaks out.

‘I am blue inside, I am the blue light’

Braid of Voices, DM Smith

Building on the idea of radiation as a contamination in the environment that inflicts wounds on bodies, it is potent to consider the wider ecological implications of this analysis. Radiation spills are an example of human interference with nature becoming destructive, or even fatal. Nick shouts to Justine that there are ‘Fifty thousand leaflets in boxes in our bedroom, our bedroom, about how nuclear waste is transported by train every week about a mile and a half from our house and I’m making you scared?’ (83). Matt Chester notes on a blog about energy technology and policy that the Hawkins Lab in Stranger Things could be considered a close allegory to the Manhattan Project. He reasons that the ‘mistakes’ made in creating the Upside Down are comparable to the mistakes of the scientists who created the atomic bomb. In this way, Stranger Things widens its lens out to historical moments of destructive nature; moments where man has used nature in ways which cause harm. This can be usefully paralleled with the leaking nuclear power plant in Speed Death, set in a post war Britain which needed a bomb to establish itself as a world power. Environmental damage in these texts is tied closely with the Conservative politics of the times (1957 and 1982). Political decisions about the development of nuclear activity and schemes that will cause environmental damage have shaped disasters such as the Windscale Fire, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and even oil spills such as Deepwater Horizon. In his introduction to Eco-Trauma Cinema Anil Narine states that ‘nature, whether it threatens us, we threaten it or we see ourselves as part of it, remains sublime in this way: something too vast in its beauty and power to comprehend.’ (1) Whether the environment is damaging us or we are damaging the environment, the destruction and pain that occurs from it is as incomprehensible as it is fascinating.

The two ideas of ‘nature’ and ‘pain’ parallel each other, particularly when considering the trauma of ecological disasters. Not only do these ideas encircle each other, but they interlock in the case study of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. Ghosh notes that ‘the history of oil is a matter of embarrassment verging on the unspeakable, the pornographic’ (75)In 2015 an article was published in the Journal of Behavioural Health Services & Research which detailed how the Deepwater Horizon spill left Gulf Coast residents traumatized. It is defined in the paper as a ‘non intentional anthropogenic (human-generated) technological disaster involving a hazardous materials spill (petroleum and dispersant chemicals) that generated severe ecological impact’ (59), however the paper then goes on to detail the trauma side effects it had on residents and workers. In the paper they reference the Exxon Valdez spill, where ‘exposed clean-up workers had signiﬁcantly higher rates of generalized anxiety disorder, PTSD, and major depression compared with non-exposed controls’ (60). In this way, ecological disaster begins to have tangible effects on bodies and minds, even if it is not directly destroying human life. In Speed Death, then, the impact of the radiation spill begins to root itself more firmly in reality, particularly when seen in conjunction with cases such as Deepwater Horizon. Environmental trauma is proven to have psychological effects on people, and so the bodily pain in Speed Death and Stranger Things can be read as a literal pain, as well as in a metaphorical way. The wounding that comes from a radiation spill is not only the long term effects on the planet, it is also the effect it has on the bodies that inhabit that planet. These two texts discuss this trauma through metaphor and genre, but they touch on an important analysis of environmental impact, which might change how we see our relationship with nature. Global heating is often an ethereal issue which does not suggest immediate threat; perhaps in understanding that the effect that nature has on our bodies is parallel to the effect we have on nature, we might come to understand the importance of tending to our wounds. Murray and Heumann map the horror genre as an ecocritical examination of a nature which fights back at its human inhabitants: ‘Godzilla springs to life from the radiation left by nuclear testing’ (xi) These critics are arguing that through the literal monsters of the horror genre (particularly in film), there is a repeated theme of human destruction of the environment. This monster imagery is apparent in Stranger Things, significantly in the final episodes of both series, in which the characters must fight off the mutated creatures that emerged from the alternate reality. Murray and Heumann write that films ‘provide a space in which to explore the complexities of a monstrous nature that humanity both creates and embodies.’ (xii) Therefore, the creation of a monstrous nature that fights back against humanity can be paralleled to the way that the Deepwater Horizon Spill was traumatic for both humans and the environment surrounding them. The oil spill was a human created disaster that affected the land just as it affected the human body, and therefore reading this with an ecocritical view shows that the line between human and nature may grow thinner, but perhaps in ways that are toxic (as in Speed Death). With this view, it is significant that the destruction goes two ways in Speed Death and Stranger Things; trauma is passed through bodies and land in a cycle of damage.

‘Drone bomb me

Blow me from the mountains, and into the sea’

Drone Bomb Me, ANOHNI

Expanding the discussion of these two texts reaches to a discussion of a collapsing world expressed through collapsing bodies. Both the hospital and nuclear power station in Speed Death are places that allude to broken bodies, particularly if we see the power station as connected to atomic bombs. In Stranger Things, the Upside Down is a destroyed world that houses destructive monsters and Hawkins Laboratory is a site of collapsing bodies (the experiments conducted on Eleven). Throughout both pieces, but more significantly in Speed Death, there is a continued theme of emergency and collapse. A collapsing environment becomes emblematic of a collapsing body; ‘I’m guessing my heart will explode for a start. So the fire alarm might go off. The whole city could very well be plunged into a state of emergency’ (16) In the Guardian review of the first production of Speed Death, it is stated that the play ‘captures the edgy anxiety of a world in meltdown and of people surviving against the odds with their tarnished halos intact.’ (Gardner) The worlds of these texts are fragile; Hawkins balances on a knife edge between our world and a dangerous alternative reality. Inevitably, this draws parallels to the climate change disaster that faces the earth. The world is on a collision course to disaster, and the anxiety about this is felt across most of the world. (Wayne Smith et al). The impending collapse of the planet and all its ecosystems is felt in both of these texts. One way this is shown is through a collapsing language. In both pieces there is a motif of language as a barrier but also as a tool. In Stranger Things, Eleven is never taught to speak, and so it is only in the second season that she begins to use language to describe herself and her abnormality. Furthermore, those around her continually do not have the words to describe her or her powers. In this way, language begins to be insufficient. Similarly, in Speed Death the language begins to break down half way through the play. All the actors start talking at the same time, speaking directly to the audience. While this happens, Ash is talking about Laura, and she falls to the floor and begins to convulse:

Unable to speak because she doesn’t trust the language she stands up in…She realizes she’s stopped breathing. She can’t remember how it goes. And a kind of alarm begins to suffuse her body…Why does this hurt? she thinks, as her heart starts to go tick tick tick… Boom. / All the streetlights outside and the lights inside begin to flash (61-62)

It is in this moment that the thesis of this essay is most clear in the text of the play. The toxicity of the hospital is subsumed into Laura’s body and she becomes part of the hospital (a vessel and a host), all because Jordan Beaker died far too young. Language collapses and speech stops working, so the body takes over. As Laura convulses and the radiation enters her veins, the environment outside starts to glitch and the world verges on collapse.

Both of these texts suggest that bodies and environments collapse together. The characters in Goode’s play refer to themselves as buildings, cities, and whole landscapes. As is noted in a review of the student production, if the body goes down, the whole city goes with it (James). Towards the end of the play, Nick and Laura discuss the state of the hospital:

NICK: This is a collapse scenario.

LAURA: I know. It’s a nightmare. (89)

The collapse scenario is happening to the hospital and power plant, but it is also happening to Nick, as he falls unconscious in the final moments of the play. As Justine notes, ‘The biggest lie, the biggest betrayal you can ever experience in art is the sham prestige of transcendence. Art that takes you, quote unquote, out of yourself.’ (75). Everything in these texts is centred on the body – there is no transcendence because it all comes back to the body. The body collapses with the earth because ‘inflamed lungs and sinuses prove once again that there is no difference between the without and the within’ (Ghosh 5), meaning that as the earth becomes increasingly toxic, so do our bodies. Theiss writes that ‘to destroy the human body is to destroy one’s planet is to destroy written history’ (139), connecting the body with the earth and reinventing them as collective rather than separate histories. As the children of Stranger Things and Speed Death become connected to their respective environments through toxic bodily invasion, their ecosystems become intertwined. As a result of this intertwining, they collapse together. Goode and the Duffer Brothers might be saying something about nature in this imagery, significantly our relationship to the land we inhabit. Reading these texts with an ecocritical lens encourages these stories to be read as allegories for the increasingly destructive world we inhabit. Our bodies are both the cause of this destruction (oil spills, global heating etc) and become destroyed as a consequence (radiation poisoning, PTSD etc). In order to decipher this allegory, it is necessary to find a new, shared language. As Nick says to Charlotte in Speed Death, ‘I need you to teach me the words. So we can have a shared language. A common ground…We have to create the language. We have to invent the ground to stand up on’ (33). This new language might be thought of as a rebirth, in the same way that Charlotte is reborn in the final moments of Speed Death.

Chris Goode’s sprawling and difficult play, Speed Death of the Radiant Child,informs how we might see the Duffer Brothers’ Stranger Things as an ecological piece of cinema. Both pieces investigate how the body becomes a vessel for the ecological workings of the world that contains it. Bodies become entry points for the trauma of their surrounding environments. They embody this environmental trauma through physical and mental unrest; the pieces suggest a new language is needed for describing this trauma, and for curing it. The radiation from the hospital seeps into Charlotte in Speed Death, just as the ‘upside down’ nestles into Will in Stranger Things. It is no accident that these two vessels are not just bodies, but children’s bodies. Their bodies are vulnerable, and therefore susceptible to the world around them. To read these pieces with an environmental lens is to understand that contamination in nature (radiation leaks, oil spills etc) leads to contamination in the body, in both a corporeal and ethereal way. Most significantly, these pieces and the critics that accompany them in this essay, are interested in collapse; both bodily and environmental collapse, as the place where rebirth might occur. These pieces allow us to see our environments differently, and further, allow abstraction to inform a newly developing language of trauma (both of the body and of the land). Reading Speed Death and Stranger Things as ecological texts that are speaking to each other about new ways of thinking about the relationship between the body and its environment invites a rethinking of the body in pain as necessarily caused by and the cause of a toxic environment.

I hate Strindberg’s Miss Julie. I just can’t shake the feeling that he was sort of a misogynistic piece of crap, and so was his play. He tried so hard to write a naturalistic play. He even proclaimed that Miss Julie was the first true naturalistic drama. But his play seems to be so far away from Naturalism as any play could be in the 19th century. It takes place on Midsummer’s Eve, when impulses are released and in the dead of night things are pushed to their carnivalistic extreme. The concept of Strindberg’s drama is that two people, (a high class woman and her father’s valet), are drawn together in a battle of psychology and sexuality.

Polly Stenham and Carrie Cracknell just sort of fuck it all up from there.

This rewrite/adaptation/overturning was so sexy. Strindberg’s version doesn’t let itself be too sexy. It’s so ***subtextual*** and ***subconscious*** that desire starts being mistaken for love. What Stenham and Cracknell’s production does so well is that it teases us with the idea that maybe these two people are actually really truly in love with each other. That the mind games are just the way they show their love. The (social and interpersonal) toxicity reveals itself in the blending of birds and the sniffing of cocaine.

The idea of carnival is extended into a rave – what happens when the night feels longer than the day? When the people who stay longest aren’t really your friends at all, and climb into your kitchen cupboards. I sometimes feel like Cracknell’s movement direction lies disjointed against her modern, clean productions. It really worked in Julie. As another Julie appears onstage in the furor of the dancing ket-heads, we realise that something has come undone in the fabric of what is meant to be. It lets the unsettling and discordant elements of the script bleed through.

Vanessa Kirby is sort of made to play this role. It’s like if Princess Margaret enjoyed EDM and MDMA. She slips and slides across the stage. Her clothing drapes and falls around her, cascading onto the floor and around her head. She is really sexy. Her voice is raspy and her hair untidy. She never lets her performance verge into the uncontrollable. She is always, we like to think, totally and utterly aware of what she is doing to Eric Kofi Abrefa’s Jean and to us. His performance glows and tilts. We are never quite sure what he is thinking, whether he loves or pities or despises or desires her – and that’s probably exactly what he wants. Then Thalissa Teixeira’s Kristina is so much more interesting, layered, and empathetic than in Strindberg’s original. Cracknell places at the forefront of scenes – silent but present. Her performance sheds a whole new light, a whole undiscovered light, onto this supposed two-hander. I care what happens to her, and what she feels.

Julie actually kills herself in this one. It’s totally unambiguous. And at first I hated that. But then I sort of think maybe it’s defiant. It is brutal. It is exactly how this very dark, very toxic, very unsettling play should end.

What happens to me, to us (maybe, maybe not you, but me, definitely me) inside that room is absolute and complete destruction. We are, she is, I am torn up from the inside out, or perhaps from the outside in. 90 minutes in and she has excavated her annihilation, and she emotionally annihilates us in the process.

Carey Mulligan holds us tight to her chest in Girls and Boys. The words hit us like darts, each sharp and knowing in its entirety. Every ounce of stage time is savored. She darts around us, scoping us out. Testing the water. Dipping her toe in. By the end, she’s pushed us all the way in and I’m not sure if my vision is obscured because of the water in my eyes or because the lights have been making me stare in the same place for too long. Lyndsey Turner directs a production that simmers. It’s a pot that takes 90 minutes to boil. All this violence sizzles at the corners of the stage, the bright strip lights illuminating and containing it in each break. It is held far away from us at first. The violence hides behind the sofa and takes its sweet time, waiting to bite down on the edges of our hearts. We know it’s coming. Kelly is nothing if not predictable. His love of humanity’s ability for ultimate, catastrophic love and atrocity sits neatly in the parameters of this script.

So we know that this violence, this unexplained violence, is coming. But for now, it’s a love story. It’s sweet and funny. Really funny. It speeds along. We’re interrupted by Carey in the living room with her kids. The set shifts. It’s almost too real to be realistic at this point, and the direct address monologues feel much more genuine than the high ceilinged apartment.

I think a lot about violence

She says it and our tone shifts. Kelly’s script is one long experiment. Make them laugh and laugh and turn to each other in their seats and smile at the familiarities of her, her life, her love, her children. Violence isn’t allowed in. It’s only on the television, or in the newspaper, on our phones, in our books, on our stages. It’s not for us though. We don’t. We don’t. Experience it. We don’t ever, really Know It.

Until we do. It’s not about gender except that it is, so much, so crucially, so deeply about gender and really about men. About the fear, the paralysing fear that I cannot ever truly know you. When I stand opposite you, my husband, the one I have said I will live with, love with, care for, comfort, forever, I don’t really know you at all. You aren’t allowed to be desensitised, not this time. This fiction has made me angry. Like fuming, cheeks hot, breathlessly angry. How the fuck have we let this happen. How the fuck can you stand there and tell me that I am not allowed to believe her. It’s not even a question for me. Of course I believe her. I believe her because I know how terrifyingly easy it is for this to be me. To be who I am, who I become. I don’t know if I would be able to hold onto love, to compassion, in the same way she does.

E: On the bus, I forgot my headphones so I was like right well gotta think about something

A: Okay go on

E: So. I think, there is a disparity between (in the show), what we see, what we hear, and what is true

A: Oooooh that’s very clever

E: Mic Drop

A: Oooo you’re so clever

E: But I was thinking about like, when you like see a show, do you like, when you remember it, do you think about what you heard, or about what you see

A: Yeah no there’s that really famous quote by someone and there like … Eve laughs … What?

Both laugh, indiscernible stuff, probably just weird noises

A: There’s a really famous quote by someone

E: By um by Ava Davies?

A: No no someone was like “Oh you never actually remember um, any of the lines of a show, which I don’t think is true, but you know, you don’t remember any of the lines”

E: Yeah we’re actually writers so

A: Yes I have a writer’s brain

Both laugh, again

A: No but like you never remember the words you remember the images that you see um I don’t know I don’t think that’s true

E: I don’t think that’s true but I think when I was, cuz when I was thinking about this I was thinking oh I definitely just remembered what I’ve seen, and then I was thinking about all the shows I’ve seen and I’ve liked, and I think about what I see with them as well

A: Yeah

E: Like with um Anyone’s Guess I just think the two girls

A: The images yeah

E: And the pillow, and like, that’s what I think

A: Yep yep, and then like the backpack, and the lights,

E: yep

eve n ava diss their friends and also brecht

A: I literally just think Victory Condition has the best beginning and ending of any show

E: So true

A: Ever.

E: Yeah.

A: It’s excessive, but like I’m a real sucker for shows that like, when the actors turn to the audience and they’re like ‘Hello.’ Like when they walked in and they were doing all, what were they doing, just like unpacking their shit and then they just looked and it was like (an un-writable sound made here, best way to describe it is :O ) Like oh my god. Everything’s Broken.

E: Yeah, it’s all broken down

A: It’s like it’s really simple as well

E: Yeah. It’s so simple.

A: And then I feel like if, like, a student did that, I would be like…whoa you’re breaking the fourth wall whoa

E: True though, like if you saw like someone here do that you’d be like

A: Yeah, I’d be like,

E: Yeah seen it before babes

A: /Bit Obvious

E: /Seen. It. Before

A: /It’s a bit Brecht

E: Okay, you’ve read a bit of Brecht, we get it

A: We get it. But I don’t know why it was so effective or like, but I guess also because maybe the tone, like it was delivered / monotonously

E: And also like, Downstairs at the Court you expect a Super Naturalistic show

A: / Yeah

E: That’s like, it’s very like, Oh my God it’s going to be like a family drama, what’s gonna happen, and they’re like ‘Hello’ and you’re like ‘Oh my God’

A: Oh my Goood

E: ‘This one’s different.’

eve n ava just talk about the end again, cuz they’re basic

E: The ending is really interesting because he wrote like, loads of different endings

A: Yeah. I haven’t actually read the ending yet, like the text

E: No, well I gave mine to someone else,

A: Did you?????

E: Yeah I gave mine to George straight away, so he still has it, and then I have to give it to Ciara

A: Oh God

E: So it’s like, I’m not gonna read it for ages. But I think that’s good

A: No that is good, cuz I like, yeah, I was, I didn’t want to read it straight after I’d seen it, cuz I just thought the ending was so precise. It’s really interesting I wonder like how much that was him and how much it was Vicky

E: Yeah true

A: You know?

E: I think he didn’t have an ending for a while. So maybe that was the ending they came up with in the rehearsal room and then he wrote a different ending and they were like, No we prefer our rehearsal one. I would fucking love that. I would not put it past Vicky.

A: I know

E: Ugh I love her

A: She’s amazing

eve n ava talk about crying, because they both cry All The Time

E: I went into Victory Condition being like I know I’m going to Love it, halfway through I was like, I don’t Like it, and

A: Oh Really

E: And when I came out I was like I Love it

A: That’s interesting

E: So weird

But I cried twice in that fucking show.

A: When did you cry??

E: Because the writing was so good

A: Which bits did you cry in?

E: … See like I don’t even remember

A: That’s really interesting that you don’t remember

E: I think it was like partly when she started talking about the girl

A: Yep

E: In the bathroom

A: Yep

E: That was really sad

And then. But I almost didn’t cry because it was sad I cried because it was like Oh My God that’s so beautiful

A: Yeah it’s written like

E: I mean obviously the situation is not beautiful that’s a horrific thing to say but like

A: No no sure sure but it is written

E: Very nice

eve n ava love Chris Thorpe ❤

E: I mean we said it when we came out but it was like this is the play we all want to write

A: Oh my god, Completely

It’s so simple

E: Yeah.

eve n ava say smart things

A: It’s interesting that you say it’s about what happens in one moment, because it’s also kind of like, The Moment, generally, like the sort of

Both: The Global Moment

A: But you know do you know what I mean it’s like, it’s more like the feeling,

Because it was just that feeling of complete terror

E: Yeah

A: And like, instability

And it was just like, Oh my God

E: Someone tweeted that it was like a 55 minute panic attack

A: OH THAT’S SO CLEVER

E: Because it just built, and I think that’s maybe partly why I cried the second time because I was just so On Edge, and I was like I just need it to be over

A: Thing is whenever, I was really apprehensive going in because

with Chris Thorpe I’m always going in with Oh my God I’m going to be so Traumatised

E: Yeah exactly

A: And it actually wasn’t

E: I feel like it was a weirdly slow burn show for a 55 minute show

A: So slow burn

But also like I knew from the beginning like when he started talking about being the sniper like I knew it wasn’t going to talk about the minute when he hits her.

E: Yeah

A: Um But that just made it worse?!

Because I knew there wasn’t going to be any like actual violence

E: Almost like gratification, like you don’t get that

A: Yeah yeah you don’t get the final sort of like

Yeah

E: Yeah you just have this Horrible build up

A: Which is the worst bit

eve n ava like breaking rules

E: But then it’s really weird because the woman’s story isn’t like this direct contrast, it’s a completely different thing? It’s this weird like frozen

A: A whole other

E: Moment, and then it’s got this Weird Sci-fi thing where she sees into the moment and it’s like Whaaaat is going on

A: I was so amazed

It was just like, it broke like, all the rules of it, for me. Which was really fun, it was just like

It was very freeing

He just sort of did it

Just went with this completely inverse, not even inverse, just like completely torn apart narrative of the woman that’s in no way related, not in any way related to, the man’s moment.

E: And I think people like, look for connections and they’re like what’s the connection, What’s the Theme here, and it’s like Well there isn’t one

A: But that’s also probably what it’s about like looking for meaning. And like so many shows are like about like Looking for Meaning in a World Without Connection, you know like

E: True, yeah. He did it very well though because it was like there is literally no, not that there was no meaning, I feel like that’s a disservice, but that

A: But like everything is so atomised

E: Yeah exactly

How do we talk about everything at once and also, nothing?

A: Yeah, and like communicate this like, deep Despair in our hearts

eve n ava get stressed

E: I didn’t feel that, like, not sad, but I didn’t feel that Hopeless throughout it I just felt, quite like stressed out,

A: Yeah no it was stressful. It was a really stressful watch.

And I guess, I didn’t feel Hopeful at the end, like when he’s, when it is that ending of like, he looks up and he’s like ‘Sharon’, and they make the eye contact and the light changes, and oh I just get goosebumbs even thinking about it. But you know that’s like, I felt like quite gratified by it? Not like totally but it was just a sort of like

E: Yeah which I kind of didn’t like

A: Really?

E: I don’t really like gimmicky endings and I felt like it was a little bit like

Ooo we’ve come out of it now so we don’t need to worry about it anymore

Each night, a new performer takes the stage for Nassim. This time it is Denise Gough, and the Bush is packed. There is a giddy feeling in the air and the audience bubbles with the idea that we will be sharing an intimate space with such a renowned actress. Already it seems on some level that tonight is not as much about Nassim Soleimanpour (our playwright) as it maybe should be. That’s not anyone’s fault, of course, it’s just a feeling I get. There’s a big group of women in front of me. They are dressed very well and all hold glasses of wine. They giggle and chat even as the lights go down. Already I’m annoyed that they aren’t so invested in this. I’m annoyed that they’re probably here for her, more than they are for him.*

Denise walks on stage to applause and an introduction and she seems nervous. Even from the outset, there are small quips and asides to the audience. She’s quick to jump on her own failings and wants us to like her. (This is emphasised when much later on, it’s revealed that the last picture on her phone is a glowing review from her last show. She jokes that even she gets insecure. I kind of feel for her in that moment and I understand her and her performance a little better)

*This all an assumption, of course. They might have been Soleimanpour’s biggest fans. I suppose my point is that it set a certain tone. For me, at least.

***

The premise of Nassim is a familiar one. The actor is unprepared and is given a script they have never seen before in an envelope on stage. Soleimnapour tricks us, but he also tricks the actor. The envelope contains one page, informing us all that the script is in fact in the hands of the playwright, who sits backstage. Denise is stuck between reading from the screen behind her and performing to us. Again, she is probably a little more vulnerable than she would like.

At various points throughout the show, the audience are one step ahead of Denise. We see the screen before she does and we spot her mistakes quicker. The script is playful, but her nervous and quick-witted persona disrupts what is ultimately a play about longing. I think this disruption is purposeful from Soleimnapour. He knows his actor will be on edge, and plays with their comfort zones, pushing them in and out of security.

***

Nassim was a deeply sad play, from what I gathered. But the audience laughed a lot.

Denise admits vulnerabilities and it is in those moments she is the most like us and without performance. Away from the stage, her nervousness subsides slightly. She opens a little more.

When she runs backstage to find him, he shares tea with her. It is a moment we aren’t allowed access to. I liked that. We see them through a screen and don’t see his face. She is less performative and I am more receptive.

How do we allow theatre to be those small moments of privacy?

How do we allow that small moment of sensitivity to be felt?

***

It was difficult to pin down a tone. I think it probably changed from night to night.

During the show I thought of Deborah Frances-White; a comedian. I thought of Tim Crouch; a writer and performer. I thought of Meera Syal, a wonderful Asian actor. How might her performance of Nassim, or White Rabbit Red Rabbit as she did at the Bush, have differed from that of the aforementioned white performers? Might it have been exactly the same?

***

I think there’s something about stories and translation and a telling. I can’t quite grasp it. There’s a lost feeling, a feeling of displacement.

There is the story through the actor, then through the physical script, then through the screen, then through the playwright, both in English and in Farsi.

I’m reminded of Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree; a story told through a number of parallel voices.

***

Maybe the audience should have been shut out slightly more? As an English speaking audience member, I and many others in this country are afforded the luxury of knowing what we are seeing and understanding what we are being told. Sometimes it might do us some good to be dropped in the deep end (see Gecko’s The Dreamer).

I have had my English words handed to me, and it is a luxury that they can be easily consumed by the majority that will watch them, and that this country allows us to perform them.

Perhaps this is missing the point and it’s more about translation and communication. Maybe we should share in our commonalities rather than shut each other out.

I can’t stop coming back to the thought that sharing is a gift.

***

I have one friend from Iran and I have known him for close to 8 years now. We’ve grown apart recently. I didn’t know that he spoke fluently in Persian as well as English until last year. It was a huge part of his life and his identity and I never saw it or knew it. I thought of him during the show.

I hope he’s doing okay.

***

So, we circle back to Denise, to the white women in the audience in front of me, giggling, and we circle back to Nassim standing on stage speaking to his mother in Farsi. She is omnipresent and also just really fucking far away. Denise cries, and she lets go of us and the performance. Soleimnapour chuckles a little as if he knows something we don’t. The women in front of me give a standing ovation. Maybe they were more receptive than I gave them credit for.

***

Nassim always knows something we don’t, and that is one of the best things about the show. Thank you for sharing.